Casting a baleful eye on ad hominem attacks, hypocrisy, media bias, obfuscation, political correctness, revisionism, sophistry, special pleading, and spin, in the media and around the web, since 2006. Oh, and sharing our much-sought-after thoughts on books, movies, TV, and anything else we feel like writing about.

You’ve Seen the Hypocrisy, Now Buy the Book!

Our favorite librarian today makes yet another impassioned plea for “open access“: a euphemism for forcing scientists and researchers to turn their work over to libraries for free dissemination instead of to evil for-profit journals and publishers, in order to bypass both the involvement of (supposedly) filthy lucre and (supposedly) snobbish, elitist, and stifling peer review, in favor of (supposedly) altruistic academic librarians who are of course naturally and inherently the appropriate gate-keepers of human knowledge and the all-knowing fully-informed arbiters of all scholarly discourse:

“A world where many more people have unfettered access to much more research and scholarship …. We have the (largely US- and Europe-based) for-profit publishers, who hate and fear open access to the point of telling flat-out lies about it.”

Never mind that any researcher that wants to put their work on the Web for free can already do so without the “help” of a librarian, thank you very much. They have to be forced to do so, because… well, because.

Well, in the spirit of good-for-the-goose-good-for-the-gander, I’d like to remind everyone that her husband’s book remains only closedly accessible, at just $49.95 from its greedy university press publisher. The proceeds from which surely do not land in her own pocket, of course.

Open access: it’s only for the stuff other people write, you see, not what Dorothea can make a buck from.